Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (12 page)

It was a difficult time, as everyone saw it, for both Sam and the QCs. The QCs did the best they could to keep Sam’s spirits up, and the authorities even let them rehearse at the jail. But it was, as someone remarked, a “lonely time” for Sam, and it seems doubtful that his mother’s and father’s prayers made him feel any better. The way he and everyone else figured it, he was the one who was never supposed to get caught; he saw himself, as he told his brother L.C. impishly, as “the all-American boy,” a guise he believed that provided the perfect cover in a society predisposed to cherish deference and charm. And yet here he was languishing in jail, unable to convince a red-faced old judge that he was anything more than some little nigger.

His immediate experience when he got out in June was no less unsettling. Itson had booked the group on another tour with the Fairfield Four, and Sam caught up with them in Birmingham. But when he arrived, he made the same kind of mistake he had made in Memphis—he drank out of a water fountain marked “Whites Only”—with the same result. The police assaulted him, he told Marvin and Gus, they dismissed him once again as just another nigger, and his spirits were so cast down he could scarcely even bring himself to perform.

But his spirits were not cast down for long. Itson continued to do everything he had promised he would, the QCs became more and more well known, and soon the time in jail seemed like no more than a temporary setback on the path that had been marked out for them from the start. In the view of Lou Rawls, now a member of the Holy Wonders (with L.C. soon to follow): “When they pull up in that Cadillac, whoa, who’s that? That’s the QCs, man, you know. The rest of us was driving cars that looked like they was going to fall apart. And they did! They could travel all over, and we was riding on rubber bands.”

They even had a “rematch” with the Valley Wonders, and this time it came out the way it was supposed to have the first time around. “We murdered them!” recalled Marvin with open glee. “Sam walked on them that day, and that’s a fact.” The entire Cook family was there to witness the QCs’ triumph. “That boy was bad,” L.C. said of the Valley Wonders’ lead singer. “He just about fell out singing.” “Yeah, but we murdered them, didn’t we?” said Marvin with undiminished satisfaction.

Things might have gone on like this indefinitely. The QCs occasionally felt a twinge of conscience (“We really misused Tate,” said Marvin, voicing a regret they all came to share in later years. “We walked away and left him stranded without even an explanation”), and they all continued to feel the economic pinch (“We really excelled under Itson, but one of the problems, unfortunately, was that we [still] didn’t have any money in our pockets”). But there was little doubt in any of their minds that they were headed for surefire success. Itson still had the connections, he evidently had the wherewithal, and, as they were well aware, he was fully prepared to use it. There was, in fact, no telling where it all might have ended if Itson hadn’t disappeared just around Christmastime.

The trouble he got into had to do with apartment rentals. There had been a spate of stories in the
Defender
all through the fall about unscrupulous landlords swindling people through the “rent racket”—which depended on a combination of an acute housing shortage and an abundance of naïveté on the part of renters and included every form of fraud and chicanery, from taking deposits for nonexistent apartments to renting the same apartment to multiple tenants to failing to provide promised amenities and services. M. L. Itson’s most egregious crime, it was revealed sometime later, involved a case of outright kidnapping, whereby he had not only taken possession of the assets and property of a wealthy elderly widow, he had imprisoned the widow herself in the basement apartment of his own home. But the QCs knew nothing of this at the time. They only knew that on December 4, without a word of warning, he simply disappeared.

It came as a tremendous shock. They had always suspected he was a little “shady.” They
knew
he was a “slickster” who was not above taking advantage of a situation or bending the rules in his favor. But to discover one day that his office was closed up and he was irrevocably gone. . . . Rumors flew all through the neighborhood; it turned out that there were something like forty “rent racket” warrants hanging over him at the time of his disappearance, and there began to be speculation about the fate of the widow whose property he was administering (and who was not actually found for well over a month, “sleeping on a filthy cot” in Itson’s basement, her personal needs and hygiene unattended to). Whatever their doubts about Itson, though, none of them had ever expected anything like this. And none of them had expected, with Christmas rapidly approaching, to find themselves in limbo once again.

For all of the QCs it was a bitter disappointment, but for Sam in particular, who at this point could almost taste stardom, it was almost unbearable. To his brother Charles, a player by now who made his living from shooting pool and rolling dice, it was more a matter of “making money and owning Cadillacs. They was little teenagers.” Lee Richard, Sam’s co-lead, saw it pretty much the same way. “We hadn’t made any money. Christmas was coming, and Sam wanted an outfit. Sam [always] wanted to be sharp.” But to L.C., there was something else involved. It was not just the economics but the status and the opportunity that making records afforded a gospel quartet. Sam had always envisioned something more.

Whatever the case, something happened at this point that no one could have foreseen. Sam was asked to join the Soul Stirrers as R.H. Harris’ replacement.

H
ARRIS HAD QUIT THE SOUL STIRRERS
some two months earlier after what appears to have been a period of considerable turmoil. He had been the heart and soul of the group from the moment he first joined, in 1937, eleven years after the group’s original founding in Trinity, Texas, by fifteen-year-old S. Roy Crain, and six years after its reformation by Crain in Houston. With his falsetto yodel, his passionate conviction, his revolutionary approach to quartet voicings (it was Harris who had introduced the concept of two contrasting vocal leads to the classic quartet formation, thereby extending membership from the conventional four to five and sometimes even six), his singing represented, as cultural historian Tony Heilbut has written, “art almost immune to criticism.” But he was also, from the time that he first joined the group, a volatile element within it, a virtuoso performer whose own opinion of himself was scarcely less than that of the most extravagant of his admirers and who, without any of the need that less accomplished individuals might be understood to feel, often shaded history to exclude or diminish the contributions of others. Still, he remained almost universally revered within the gospel community, and it would have been virtually impossible for anyone with any knowledge of that community to imagine the Soul Stirrers without their principal lead voice, particularly at this moment in their history.

The Soul Stirrers in 1950 stood at a commercial crossroads. Newly signed to the Specialty label in Hollywood through the good offices of Pilgrim Travelers manager and tenor singer J.W. Alexander, the group had put out three releases on the label by the fall of 1950, with the first, an intense two-part version of the 1905 Charles Tindley gospel classic, “By and By,” selling twenty-six thousand copies, and the second, the equally uncompromising “I’m Still Living On Mother’s Prayer,” up to eighteen thousand on their latest royalty statement. These were good, if not great, sales figures (the Travelers by comparison had sold over 270,000 copies of all their Specialty releases in the first three quarters of 1950), but Specialty owner Art Rupe cautioned patience, pointing out that their old label, Aladdin, had sold no more than five or six thousand apiece of the last few Soul Stirrers releases and that “as you get more records out on the SPECIALTY label, you will build your name up again to where it once was.”

Specialty had just set up its own booking agency, Herald Attractions, and with the promise of better-paying dates and the addition, in late 1949, of a new second lead, Paul Foster, as hard-driving as anyone other than Archie Brownlee (and capable of stirring Harris on to even greater heights), the Soul Stirrers appeared to be facing the prospect—or at least the possibility—of a second golden age. That was why Harris’ departure was as much of a shock to his own group as it was to the general public.

There were three principal theories for that departure. The first was the one propounded by Harris himself, who was generally recognized as being among the most “conscientious” and strictly religious of the spiritual singers. As J.W. Alexander, who would almost certainly have characterized himself as a more worldly man, said, “Harris really believed in what he was doing; he didn’t like to joke about it.” Or as Harris himself said to Tony Heilbut, “The moral aspects of the thing just fell into the water. The singers . . . felt they could do anything they wanted.”

Others viewed the matter somewhat differently. Some opined that with a paternity suit hanging over him in Cleveland, Harris was in no position to be self-righteous about the moral pitfalls of the road and that Cleveland was too important a market to be shut out of.

A third opinion took heed of both of the others and, without necessarily negating either, suggested that, as in almost everything else, politics was at the bottom of it all. Harris, as the acknowledged star of the Soul Stirrers and the single element anyone might view as indispensable, was “pulling a power play” in the eyes of more than one of his contemporaries, quite simply angling for a bigger piece of the pie for himself.

Harris certainly knew as well as anyone that gospel was at the dawn of a new, and considerably more affluent, age. On October 8 gospel music had come to Carnegie Hall for the first time in the person of Mahalia Jackson and the Ward Singers—but with offers having been tendered to the Soul Stirrers and the Pilgrim Travelers as well. An article was just about to come out in the December 1950 issue of
Ebony,
the Afro-American version of
Life
magazine, which would characterize the Soul Stirrers as “the top gospel group in the country” in a text that celebrated gospel music culturally and historically as not only “the greatest contribution of the Negro to the rich musical lore of the U.S.” but also a commercial format in which “gospel singers are earning more today than many crooners or blues singers.” In such a climate it would not have been difficult for Rebert Harris to imagine that he was holding a winning hand in seeking merely to be rewarded in a manner commensurate with his talents.

Whatever the explanation, and however exactly it was done (Harris always remembered announcing it at a program at DuSable in the fall, though, he was quick to point out, he had told the other members of the group a year earlier, “but they didn’t believe me”), Harris’ resignation, once proffered, was immediately accepted. And S.R. Crain, the no-nonsense founder and business manager of the Soul Stirrers, wasted no time finding a replacement. After trying out Paul Foster as first lead singer for no more than two months, Crain determined that for all of the passion of his singing and for all of his brilliance in the second lead’s role as instigator and foil, Foster lacked both the temperament and imagination to keep the Soul Stirrers on the path that Harris had first set for them. That was when he got in touch with Sam.

It no longer mattered at this point whether he and the other Soul Stirrers had ever actually been jealous of the QCs, as the brash young quartet always believed. The idea that Crain might have planted R.B. Robinson in their midst as a hedge against the day when Harris’ ego would inevitably overcome his talent had never even occurred to them. What Crain was first and foremost, though, the QCs all recognized, was a good businessman. And, not surprisingly, he came to their lead singer now, unbeknownst to the rest of them, with a straightforward business proposition.

It was certainly a logical avenue to pursue. Sam knew all of the Soul Stirrers’ songs, not just from R.B. Robinson’s coaching but because of his own unqualified love for the music. And the timing was certainly right, with Itson on the lam and the QCs in turmoil. Crain invited Sam to his apartment at 542 East Forty-fifth Street almost surreptitiously in the dead of night. They ran through a few numbers, and then Crain asked him to sing W. H. Brewster’s “How Far Am I From Canaan?,” a number the Soul Stirrers were thinking about recording that Crain was unaware Sam had learned in Memphis from the Reverend Brewster himself. Crain started the song, the other Soul Stirrers fell in behind, and then Sam took it, “he did it precisely and better,” in Crain’s recollection, “and with his own style!” In Crain’s further recollection, there was a second audition that same evening, with Reverend Leroy Taylor, a longtime member of the Norfolk Singers who had sung on and off with the Soul Stirrers for the last couple of years, but if there was, it was a perfunctory affair. There was no longer any question about it: Sam Cook was Crain’s boy.

The next day Sam came back to the house in the Stirrers’ new Packard with five suits Crain had just bought him for their upcoming tour. L.C.’s reaction was one of unrestrained admiration. “I said, ‘Man, you’re looking good. I wish I could go with you.’”

The reaction from the QCs and their fans was nowhere near as benign. Even Sam’s fifteen-year-old sister, Agnes, felt more than a little betrayed. “Oh, I was hurt, because the QCs were my group—I really related to them. We were all about the same age, we went to the same school, we grew up together. I felt that he was deserting them, and I really didn’t like it.”

The QCs liked it even less. They saw R.B. as a turncoat, someone they had trusted as a friend but who, they now felt, was nothing but a backstabber. More than that, they were disappointed and puzzled by Sam. They could understand the profit motive—even Agnes could concede that—but they felt almost as betrayed by the secretive manner in which Sam had come to his decision as by the decision itself. They simply couldn’t fathom how someone as articulate as Sam Cook, someone as sure of himself and his actions, almost to the point of arrogance, could fail to even inform them that he was leaving. Instead, he came to them one at a time under cover of confidentiality and discussed the possibility of his departure as if it were no more than a theoretical proposition.